So a couple of weeks ago I received in the mail one of those newsletters from my alma mater from the dept. of Cellular & Structural Bio (or maybe it was Molecular & Cellular Bio--who knows? They completely reorganized the bio curriculum like the year after I graduated, and I'm pretty sure what I majored in [general biology] doesn't even exist anymore). Anyway, I glanced through the newsletter quickly to see if anyone I knew was in it, and on the last page there was an obituary for my favorite professor, Dr. Roderick MacLeod, who taught Immunology at U of I for many years. Actually, the year I took his course, my junior year of college, was the year he retired (Spring semester of 2001)--officially, anyway--he was so well-liked that the administrators convinced him to come back and give one "encore performance" of his course for Spring 2002. I remember trying to arrange my senior schedule so that my classes didn't overlap his and I could go sit in on his lectures sometimes, that's how much I enjoyed his teaching, but I had some stupid required lab or something that got in the way, and I was only able to sit in on his class once or twice when my lab was canceled.
Anyway, Dr. MacLeod was an amazing professor. He was from Scotland originally and so of course had the remnants of that great Scottish accent. Every lecture of his consisted of the following: he would make a few copies of figures from recent Immunology journal articles, slap them on the overhead projector, and just talk to us for an hour. Never any reading from prepared notes, no PowerPoint slides ever made an appearance--it was just Dr. MacLeod and his overhead projector, and he would engage the entire lecture hall (probably about 100 students or so) in an hour-long conversation. That's the best way I can think of describing it. I've never seen any other professor who was able to do this quite so effectively. Every lecture really felt like one interesting, free-wheeling conversation, where he would tell us stories of scientific discoveries, new and old. He asked us questions; we asked him questions. It was a fantastic class.
Dr. MacLeod's class was also the most difficult course I took in college--immunology is a tough subject; there is a lot of memorization of different pathways and cellular cascades. But Dr. MacLeod was quite adamant about not allowing us to just memorize the material that would be likely to be on his test; it was more important to him that we learn and understand the concepts involved. (Although this isn't to say he wanted us to get away with not memorizing anything--I remember one particular instance where he came back from a lecture in the medical school [he taught the medical student immunology course as well] and apparently some of the medical students had not yet learned the blood clotting pathway, and Dr. MacLeod was so taken aback that students could get through four years of undergrad without learning this that he put up a diagram of the pathway on his projector right then and there and made us all commit all the steps to memory.) Not that I recall any of it seven years later, but at least I know to be ashamed that I can't!
Since I took Dr. MacLeod's course the semester he was preparing to retire, the immunology TAs asked us students to each write a message to Dr. MacLeod that they were then going to assemble into a book to present to him at his retirement party. I really wish I could have seen the finished product. Obviously my message was embarrassingly long and effusive. I wrote something about how when I entered college, I had come with this vision of exciting, challenging courses that would teach me not just concrete information but new ways of thinking about things. But after three years of mundane coursework I had given up hope of this being more than a naive, nerdy teenager's pipe dream. Dr. MacLeod's Immunology class was different. It was rigorous and intellectually stimulating and even (!!) something I looked forward to attending. If I somehow magically had the ability to go back and take it all over again, I would jump at the chance. Where are time machines made out of phone booths when you need them, anyway?
I tried to find the obituary online so I could link to it here, but apparently that newsletter is one of the few things left in the world that doesn't have a cyberspace corollary. Strangely enough, I instead found a YouTube memorial video of Dr. MacLeod and the blog post of another former student of his. I am going to shamelessly steal some of what she wrote to post here, as I really liked it and am afraid of it disappearing someday:
I learned today that another of my favorite professors has passed away in the past year. Roderick Macleod taught Immunology for many many years and retired in 2001 after 43 years of service. His class was incredibly interesting and he was an engaging lecturer. The lectures combined basic information with information from research papers published just a week or two before the lecture was given. He was particularly fond of telling people that their immunology textbook was out of date before they ever purchased it, even if it was only published two weeks ago, because the field is constantly changing.
The exams Dr. Macleod gave were challenging and inevitably asked questions about journal articles we hadn't read, but the questions were structured in a way that if you knew the basics of immunology, you could figure out the answer to the question. I remember struggling in one exam with a question about some new discovery regarding the immune system of horses, in which we were supposed to hypothesize how we thought a particular pathway might work, based upon what we knew about the JAK-STAT pathway. I had a long several minutes of frustration and panic during which I nearly convinced myself that I would never be able to answer the question, when I heard Dr. Macleod's voice in my head ask me what I knew about JAK-STAT. So I wrote that down and then looked at what other small chunks of the question I knew something about. By breaking it all down, I was able to actually reason my way through the question and ended up with the same hypothesis that the investigators posed in their paper. In other words, the exams actually tested what you had learned and expected you to think, rather than vomit memorized factoids onto the page. Because of this, the majority of the students hated the class and considered it to be impossibly and unnecessarily difficult. Several cellular biology students I knew were greatly relieved when Dr. Macleod retired and they didn't have to take the class from him.
The semester I took immunology (spring 1996), Peter Doherty and Rolf Zinkernagel won the Nobel Prize in medicine for their discoveries concerning the specificity of the cell mediated immune defense and how the immune system recognizes cells which have become infected with viruses. Dr. Macleod lectured about their discovery and explained how it worked. (Dr. Macleod was particularly fond of "sexy macrophages" and "sexy T-cells".) ... I still occasionally hear his voice (and that of my calculus professor, Dr. Heinie Halberstam) when I get stuck on a problem and try to tell myself I'll never be able to solve it. Then I look at what parts of the question I can answer and chip away at it until I get the whole thing solved. Thank you Dr. Macleod.
Dr. Macleod died September 3rd on the Isle of Lewis. He was 70 years old.
I can't believe she can remember a specific exam question from over ten years ago, yikes! I wish I had that kind of memory. But that reminds me of one more thing I wanted to write about Dr. MacLeod, and then I'll shut up and move on to other things: he wrote the best exams. If I remember correctly, they were all short answer and considered to be quite difficult. This was, of course, because he made us *think* to answer questions and not merely regurgitate facts. He loved bizarre hypothetical questions (like, what if this was discovered and then this happened and you had to figure out what was going on. "Give your best explanation" of this totally wild scenario.) And he liked to put one or two "trick" questions into each exam, which basically meant a question whose answer was so simple that most of the class would inevitably overlook it and get it wrong. I remember my TA imploring us to make sure we paid attention to the sex of the patient in the exam question, as he said that one year Dr. MacLeod put in some question that went something like, "Billy has [some Y-chromosome related disease]"....long description of the disease qualities..."His sister, Sally, has no symptoms of the disease. Why is this?" and at least half the students in the class could not figure out the answer, and kept going over and over this long description of the disease looking for clues. Of course, the answer was that she didn't have the disease because she was a girl and had no Y-chromosome. :-)
OK, so onto other things....poker is going so-so. The games have been much better lately than they have in the past few months, but I haven't been happy with how I've played. Too much bluffing and too many hero calls. Strangely enough, this is not a good strategy against maniacs and TAGfish...shocking, I know! It's hard to stay disciplined about this when you're running bad, though. I always end up trying to make something happen and push the envelope anytime I perceive myself to have a small edge. But somehow I always seem to do better when I sit back and don't try to look for spots where I can pick up a few BBs. Just relax and play reactively, not try to press the situation. I wonder if that's true of all poker players to some extent, or if I'm just not good enough to be playing a more "proactive" style. (Probably a little of both, huh?) So I am going to work on staying true to my nitty nature and try to avoid overthinking things to the point that I end up leveling myself. I'll let you know how it goes...
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